SI can write and speak like a human. She creates pictures, formulates poems like an artist. She writes scientific essays and class tests. It assists doctors in detecting skin or breast cancer. It is part of war drones and other intelligent weapon systems. There seems to be almost nothing that artificial intelligence (or AI for short) cannot do. And it is becoming more and more powerful, which can be observed in the ChatGPT AI system from the American company Open AI. The rapid progress scares many. Twitter and Tesla boss Elon Musk considers artificial intelligence potentially “more dangerous than the atomic bomb” and calls for a break in development with other managers and scientists.
What is real, what is fake? What helpful, what harmful? What does the development of this technology mean for work, prosperity, democracy and for the question of war or peace? Do the Germans have too many concerns and are gambling away their future, in which the Americans and China have long since started unassailably? Maybrit Illner posed these questions to her five guests on Thursday evening in her program “Artificial Intelligence – Machine versus Man?” “, Saskia Esken, SPD party leader and trained computer scientist, and Achim Berg, president of the Bitkom digital association.
What was the first thing he asked ChatGPT, the hostess asked Ranga Yogeshwar right at the beginning of the show. It was like a rush for the physicist when ChatGPT emerged late last year. “You tried everything. I asked the AI, ‘Am I married?’ And then it came out: ‘Yes, with Manshi Yogeshwar, also a physicist, and they both have two children.’ That was a lie, but it was fantastic.” “You could see immediately that there was huge potential on the one hand, but on the other hand you noticed – oh, be careful.”
What is real, what is fake?
“And what new opportunities can we look forward to?” Illner asked. “The dam burst,” says Yogeshwar. Development began in 2017, and last year it became apparent that these large language models had taken on a whole new quality. “We already knew Siri. But now there’s an AI that’s starting to do everything at once: image recognition, text recognition, and speech recognition. And which is becoming more and more powerful and which optimizes itself.” “And simulates people,” added Illner and showed the film of a deceptively real young Chinese singer who accompanies herself on the guitar, but behind whom there is in fact AI software.
“Are these the avatars we fall in love with, with whom we are supposed to make friends?” “These deceptively real pictures, these films we will see more and more in the coming years,” Yogeshwar was convinced, who could see a certain fascination. But what will happen emotionally when we talk to these human-like avatars who also understand how we feel? “We still don’t have an answer as to where this is going.”
Our lives will change more through AI than through the smartphone and even through the internet, said Miriam Meckel. “We are in the middle of a live experiment right now. When ChatGPT launched last year, it was like the iPhone artificial intelligence moment,” Meckel said. What used to be reserved for certain applications is now manageable for everyone. You can have conversations with an AI at home or have it write texts. This is a change in our cultural evolution, in which we are currently in a self-experiment. “And we don’t know what will come of it. We always ask what is technology doing to us. Technology doesn’t do anything – we invent it and use it.” And everything that AI does is created by us interacting with it. “There is a whole branch of industry that produces digital people who can provide all communication services, they can even moderate programs.” And these digital people are so perfect that we reacted to them as if they were normal people, believes Meckel. “And this is an experiment that will change the way we behave.”